Hands-On Windows 193 transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:00]:
Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to look at two major updates coming soon to Windows 11, to Windows Update, and to the Taskbar. This is a big one. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Thurrott, and last week we talked about changes to the Windows Insider program. Tied to this are other changes coming to Windows 11 that we can test in the Insider program. Microsoft had that pain point announcements a couple of months ago.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:36]:
They've started implementing changes. We've been talking about this for months. It's. It's actually kind of a big deal. I think we're going to be talking about this for a long time. So for this episode, what I wanted to do was look at two of the changes that Microsoft has shipped to the Insider program, which is giving people a chance to test it before it goes out in stable. It's possible by the time you see this video, it might even just be generally available. But if not, you can join or enroll any computer in the Insider program and test this for yourself if you want to come see this stuff.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:04]:
So the first of the two is tied to Windows Update. So if you open the Settings app and navigate to Windows Update, this basically looks the same as it did before. So in this system, I've enrolled it in the Insider program. It's in the experimental channel. I enabled all the feature flags, so I see all the changes. If you're familiar with Windows Update, this should look almost the same. So you can still get those preview updates automatically if you want. You still get update history.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:30]:
All the same advanced features as before, including optional updates, delivery optimization, etc. And then the Insider program stuff. So looking at this, I mean, hopefully most people don't look at this per se, but people like us, you know, we check for updates, we do this kind of stuff. The goal here for Windows Update with Microsoft is to reduce the interruptions, allow you to skip updates during PC setup. So when you first bring up a computer, if there's a feature update to install, you're actually going to be able to skip over that. I've seen this now, I think twice. That saves up to 40 minutes depending on your computer. It's kind of cool.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:08]:
You can install that later. Just get to the desktop, fewer automatic restarts and notifications. Although, again, if you go into advanced options, you can kind of control that to some degree already. But the goal here is a single reboot every month, which I've never seen, but that's the system. So once you install the feature flag, if you're inside a program or once this is just updated in Windows, you will come to Windows Update. And the obvious change, the big change is this thing here. So this is the Pause Updates interface. So before what you could do is click this I think seven times, six or seven times, and extend the pause out one week each time you clicked.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:48]:
And once you did that, this would change into an unpause button essentially and you could click this just to go back to normal. So the promise here is that you will be able to pause updates essentially forever. That's not technically true because obviously at some point there'll be a zero day something or whatever, some, you know, very serious security problem and you'll have to install that update and your system will have to reboot. But what they are doing here is just giving you kind of a nice calendar control where by default I'm recording this on. Let's see if I can figure out how to scroll through this thing. So it set it to. Oh, that is the date. I'm sorry, let me do that again.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:28]:
So this is the date I'm recording this on is May 21st. And they're giving me this calendar here where I can go out to here. But the way that this works in effect is that if I choose that date as we get closer to that date, I can then keep extending it. So it's technically, you know, better than it was before in the sense that it doesn't hard stop at the sixth or seventh week. You can just keep going again, not really forever, but you can do this for months. Potentially they've just implemented this, so there's no experience yet with how this will or will not really happen. But the idea here is that for those people that really just don't want to install updates, just want to keep that thing running and pretend they're using Linux or something. I guess this will give you that opportunity.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:14]:
So it's too soon now to, you know, see how well it does work with that further extension thing. But, but you can do that. That's the theory anyway. So that's, that's nice. The bigger update or really set of updates is for the taskbar. So I think I have. Let me see if I have a shot of this. Yeah, if you look at, well, we looked at this before.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:37]:
So Microsoft had promised to allow you to move the taskbar to other parts of the screen, meaning the size. So the top, the left to right side, right, not just on the bottom. This was you know, something a lot of enthusiasts, especially power users, was asking for. I'm not really sure how many people were using the taskbar like this, but in Windows 11, the taskbar has always been stuck to the bottom of the screen. It's just been the way it is. So they're gonna change that. And I think I showed this shot earlier. Hilarious.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:05]:
But the other thing that we lost, and this gets talked about a lot less, and this was a bigger deal for me, is that they used to be able to make the taskbar smaller. So all of the icons would be smaller. The taskbar itself would be shorter, and it would take up a lot less space on screen. If I go out of here and you look at this taskbar, you can see it's pretty big, it's tall, it's taller than I want. And I've tried different things. You can hide the taskbar, obviously, but then you can't see the time, you know, so I've done different things over the past couple years to try to get around this. Microsoft recently added the ability to make the icon smaller, which can be automatic, or you could just do it, you know, manually and say, I want them always to be smaller. But here's a shot of what that looks like.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:48]:
So this is the normal taskbar here. So, yeah, the icons are smaller, but the taskbar is the same size. It's like, what is this thing like? So to get around this problem, I used utilities. One of the better ones is start 11 also has some taskbar controls. And one of the things you can do at Start 11 is make the taskbar smaller in Windows 11, which is something that should just be built in. But the good news is that's actually going to happen. So if you're familiar with this, you know, you can go into the Settings personalization taskbar. And like the Windows Update interface we just looked at, it's looks the same, right? It's basically the same thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:26]:
But if you go in to not little further. Here we go. Taskbar behaviors. You're going to see some new things. So the first one is this taskbar position interface. So you can put it over on the left, right? And this is that interface that kind of showed off. But now you can test it if you're inside a program, right? Move it to the top. You know, same deal.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:47]:
You know, everything works. It. The animations occur from the right places. You know, they're. They're walking through this to make sure that it's right. But, you know, it looks pretty good to me. You think about the way the flyout works here, it's not horizontally laid out, it's vertically laid out. That makes sense.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:04]:
It's pretty good. But as you can see, the problem here is that the taskbar is still humongous. So they have said that they're going to make or give you the ability to make the taskbar smaller. They haven't changed the text. It still says show smaller taskbar buttons, but this actually makes the taskbar smaller now, which is what everyone wanted, right? So if you change this to always just so you can see it, you can see now, not only are the buttons on the taskbar smaller, but the entire taskbar is smaller. It's not quite half, but it's almost half the height. And that to me, that to me is the greatest thing that's ever happened. This is such a huge improvement.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:44]:
I've wanted this so bad, I had to disable it to start the recording here, but I've got to leave. This is how my computers are always going to look. I mean, it's just no doubt about it. So you can really get an idea of, you know, this is what people have been asking for, some of them Anyway, since Windows 11 first came out. Microsoft has steadfastly said, nope, not doing that too. But too few people do. It's not worth it. But as part of this pain points initiative that they're doing in 2026, they are making this change.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:16]:
You can test it now in the Insider program and you should be able to get it stable soon. And so as I record this in very late May 2026, this is an experimental channel, so it's reasonable to expect June, July somewhere in that timeframe, it will head into the Beta channel. If it's not already there by the time you see this, it will make its way into the release preview channel and then it will ship out as a preview update at some point. So I would say probably June ish or July. And then you'll be able to get this in stable and it will just happen and we'll finally have what so many of us wanted for so long. So it's good news. Hopefully you found this useful. It's possible you found this exciting enough that you're joining the Insider program now.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:58]:
So I certainly did. I. This is something I don't really care about where the thing is, but I want it to be smaller. This is wonderful. So thank you so much for watching. Thank you especially to our Club Twit members.